Page 73 of Cold Sacrifice

“I’d walked halfway to town,” she said, and though her voice was a little too high and a little too soft, she was calmer. “I’d lost one of my shoes and my foot was bleeding. I didn’t know where I was.” The tears were heavy in her voice, but she didn’t break down.

I looked at Zach. Call Sam, I mouthed.

He nodded and walked out of the room to ask Sam to go take care of Lucy.

“What were you looking for?” Trinity asked, gently. “What did your dream show you?”

“There’s something in Huntersburg,” Lucy said, and her voice went so dead and flat that it gave me chills. “Something bad. Our little town is hiding something terrible, Kait, and it starts with the sheriff. I was going to see him. Not because he’s hurting, but because he’s hurting someone else.” She hesitated. “More than one person. I kept seeing his face, though I’ve never before seen the sheriff of Huntersburg. I know what he looks like, because I was standing beside him while he did something that made someone scream.”

She went silent for so long that finally, I prompted her to continue.

“I wasn’t the victim, Kait,” she whispered. “You know I’m always the victim. I’m always with them, I am them, seeing what they see, feeling their pain, hearing their cries for help…but this time, I wasn’t the victim. I was the sheriff. I was the one hurting people.”

And she was simply devastated, because she believed she’d switched from good to evil. When her changes happened, they happened in a big, bad way.

“Oh sweetie,” I said. “We’ll figure this out. Sam’s on his way to you. I’ll come home and we’ll figure this out.”

“No,” she said. “You have to work. You have to catch the necromancer. We’ll talk when you get here. But I’m glad Sam is coming, because I need someone with me until I…until I’m not sleepwalking and falling asleep in the middle of lunch.”

“I know,” I told her. “It’ll be okay.”

“I left the door open, Kait,” she said, her voice almost too low for me to hear. “I left the door wide open, and the hounds came into the kitchen and knocked everything off the table to get to the food I’d left there.”

I put my hand to my chest. “Lucy, where’s Ash?”

“Ash is a good boy,” she said. “He never left the house. When I got back, he was sitting in the corner of the kitchen with a look in his eyes, like he was asking me did I not realize I’d walked out and left the door open, and the messy hounds came in and scared him?” She gave a watery laugh. “Ash is fine.”

But Lucy wasn’t.

“May I visit you now, Lucy?” Trinity asked. Without waiting for an answer, she turned to me. “I’d like to live on your property for a while so I can help her. Either that or she comes to stay with me, and I don’t think she’ll agree to leave you and the boys.”

“I won’t,” Lucy said.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll make room for you.”

“I have a camper van,” she said. “I’ll drive it out and park it in your backyard near the woods. I’ll happily live in it while I take care of Lucy. It won’t take long. Lucy’s very powerful. She just doesn’t know how to be what she is, and everything’s coming out haphazardly.”

Lucy wasn’t about to argue. “Thank you, Trinity. I’m feeling a little…chaotic.”

“We’ll talk about Sheriff Lawson when I get there,” I told Lucy. I’d never met him. Before I’d left my mother’s house, there’d been a different sheriff. When I’d moved back to Huntersburg, I’d looked up the law enforcement and other officials in the tiny town. I had a vague recollection of the sheriff’s face.

Funny how I remembered thinking at the time that he had kind eyes. But if he was making people scream, he was likely not a kind man.

I was going to have to tangle with a small town’s cops. That was almost never fun. But Huntersburg was my town now, and I’d do what I needed to do.

I had a feeling that even more than my asskicking pack, Richard the ghost was going to be the one to help me do that.

If, of course, I could find him.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I missed Joe so badly that by the time night rolled around, I’d half convinced myself there was no real risk. If Jolene compelled him, Remy, Zach, and I would be there to control him. Joe was a vampire, but he wasn’t stronger than all of us together.

Not yet, anyway.

I needed to talk to him, but first, I called Bastien the second darkness fell.

“I’m fine,” he told me. “Farrow is fine, as well. If I find any deaths, I’ll call you.”